Poetry, Fiction, Indian Writing in English, Comparative Literature, Criticism; you'll find most of it here simplified

Sunday, 19 August 2012

Overview of “From the Anxiety of Influence” and “Six Revolutionary Ratios” written by Harold Bloom

When you take up this essay one aspect that comes up is how
Bloom was influenced so strongly by the concept of intra-poetic relationships.
A poet takes up, leaves off, deviates or elaborates through his new poem on
some poem of his contemporaries or predecessor. Poetic misinterpretation occurs
when a poet misses the meaning of a poem he reads and bases a new poem on his
interpretation of a former one. Which means, as per quality, though the former
poem was not perfect, the latter is even worse.

It is really interesting to juxtapose Bloom’s views of
poetry with that of Shelley as found in “A Defence of Poetry”. Shelley speaks
of poetic language as ever changing the meaning of symbols and metaphors. For
him this was a positive fact as language would be stagnant otherwise. Bloom on
the other hand, thrusts on the importance of holding a symbol and bringing out
its meaning to the full even while mistrusting imagination as it may lead to
misinterpretation of the original symbol.

Background on ‘A Meditation upon Priority and a Synopsis’

Bloom’s main objective was to describe poetic influences and
give some insight into intra-poetic relationships. Bloom believed that we hold
a highly idealized notion of how one poet can help form another which isn’t
always the case. According to him, poetic history and poetic influence are one
and the same thing. Poets do not read other poets correctly by virtue of being
poets themselves. It is the misrepresentations that lead to creations of
unfilled imaginative space.

The Anxiety of Influence defined

When a poet reads a work of literature he might be
influenced by it and this influence can lead both to imitation or a work on a
slightly different plane than what he has read. If we were to look at the case
of Oscar Wilde in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” we see this influence working
negatively. His lyrics are too closely entwined with the entire English
Romantic period. Perhaps because of this realization, Wilde’s incidental remark
on influences quite cryptically defines the anxiety of influence in a nutshell.

“Influence is simply a
transference of personality, a mode of giving away what is most precious to
one’s self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a reality of
loss. Every disciple takes away something from his master.”

Later in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Wilde has a softer
view this where he associates immortality to the exercise of influence:

“Because to influence
a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts,
or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins,
if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone
else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”

While influence works both consciously and unconsciously,
there have been writers like Stevens who felt that the product of their efforts
was whole unique and that they have not been influenced at all. To quote
Stevens on one such instance:

“While, of course, I
come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge,
Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My
reality-imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others.”

“I am not conscious of
having been influenced by anybody and have purposely held off from reading
highly mannered people like Eliot and Pound so that I should not absorb
anything, even unconsciously.”

While this is all very well, one has to admit that
influences act upon us in all fields of life and it would be too hypothetical
to assume that we could consciously decide which to accept and which to
reject.Nor can it be possible that
poetic influence exists only in “furiously active pendants” to quote Bloom;
like Eliot and Pound. This belief itself is another species of melancholy or
anxiety principle.

Poetic Misprision

“But poetic influence need not make poets less original; as
often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better.” (Bloom)

To truly study poetic influence, one can’t just go down the
path of history. To understand poetic misinterpretation, it is necessary to
study the life of the poet as a poet. And as Freud pointed out the family
romance with its loves-hates, when studying it through a life-cycle view, the
relations between poets too has to be considered.

Nietzsche and Freud

Bloom was influenced greatly by the German philosopher and
the Austrian psychoanalyst. It is Nietzsche that provides Bloom with food for
thought regarding the ascetic aspects of an aesthetic temperament. Freud and
his defense mechanism on the other hand, are a parallel to the revisionary
ratios Bloom propounds about intra-poetic relationships.

There is no second chance in poetry. If a poem that has been
written before fails to catch the point, due to poetic misinterpretation the
second attempt at coming to the point is even worse. Bloom here brings in
Freud’s concept of substitution. A substitute can in no way replace what one
misses at first chance; in Bloom’s words: Poets as poets cannot accept
substitutions, and fight to the end to have their initial chance alone.

Nietzsche and Freud have held too much faith in
phantasmagoria (imaginative fancies) for according to Bloom, art is not all
that simple. A poem is just not the flight of fancy of one poem as it has roots
in earlier works and any misinterpretation along the line can cause serious
deviations. The original source of inspiration itself also may not be perfect
so we have the picture of an artist’s fight against art.

Six Revisionary Ratios

(1)Clinamen

Poetic misreading (misprision) which means the poet swerves
away from his precursor not intentionally but by a misreading or Clinamen of
it. This may appear to be a corrective measure as the poet modifies what he
feels needs to be changed, for a more accurate finis. Thus, the poem may be
like the former one upto a certain point after which it moves away in a new
direction.

(2)Tessera

Completion and antithesis in which the poet uses a symbol of
a parent- poem completing what it aims at but reads the symbol in a another
sense than what it was supposed to convey. And using this new sense of
direction and the symbol in the parent-poem, executes a new poem creating an
antithesis.

(3)Kenosis

Breaks away from repetition and aims at a discontinuity, if
the precursor took a view of poetry as divine and poet’s as god-like for
example, his successor will gradually move away from this construct and place
poetry as an activity of the mind with poets as philosophers.

(4)Daemonization

The poet believes that the parent-poem has inspired him
while he writes his new poem but the inspiration comes purely from imagination.
However, due to his felt inspiration from the parent poem, he incorporates
elements of it into his new poem taking away some of the uniqueness of the
earlier work.

(5)Askesis

The poet adds a part of his own imagination to the poem
making it different from the rest of the poems and thus, affects also the
parent-poem by making it stand apart from the new poem.

(6)Apophrades

Returning to the dead or a full circle, here it seems as if
the poet is back where he started i.e. the parent-poem but there is a
difference. The essence of the poem makes us believe that it is the same poet
who has written the former parent poem as well instead of merely borrowing from
it. The characteristic style of the precursor has been imbibed in the new poem.

Summary

“If to imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems
antithetical to their precursors, then to imagine after a poet is to learn his
own metaphors for his acts of reading.” (Bloom)

Every poem is thus, a misinterpretation of a parent-poem and
a poem isn’t overcoming anxiety; it is that anxiety. Bloom felt the same
applied to criticism too and so there can be no interpretations only
misinterpretations which make criticism a species of prose poetry. For Bloom,
Poetry is the anxiety of influence and is misalliance, misunderstanding and
misinterpretation personified.

In poetry there is both contraction and expansion for the
ratios of revision are contracting while the actual making of a poem is its
expansion. Good poetry must have the revisionary ratios along with freshness of
perspective.

2 comments:

Many thanks for the exciting blog posting! I really enjoyed reading it, you are a brilliant writer. I actually added your blog to my favorites and will look forward for more updates. Great Job, Keep it up..natural treatment for anxiety